12 quotes to guide your marketing strategy in 2012

It’s hard to believe this is our 101st blog post of 2011—our 752ndsince this blog was launched back in 2006. On the back of every one of our business cards is the phrase:

The world’s most powerful software is the human mind.

Post after post, I’m amazed at how clearly this truth is shining through in the words of my colleagues, in those of the amazing people we interview, and in the ideas we explore. The quotes you’ll find in this post reflect the best of this blog this year (in no particular order), and can inform the world’s best marketing strategies in 2012. If you’re a regular reader, thank you for sharing some of your year with us. If you’re new here, welcome— you’ve got a lot to explore!

Marketing, of course, is not advertising. It’s everything in your story, from the product to the price to what you focus on. So it’s a mistake to make it one thing, to have one metric. Most of all, I’d measure this: will they miss you when you’re gone.

Think about this: this is the first time in human history that word of mouth, which has been with us since the dawn of humanity and the days of the earliest bartering and bazaars, is digitally archived – and it will undoubtedly change the world.

Brands typically see the value in social currency through the lens of word of mouth. They want consumers to share their brand with one another, and the more they do so, the more social currency the brand has earned. This lens is still incredibly important, but there’s another lens that adds an important dimension to the value of sharing, and technology is finally allowing brands to see their customers more holistically than ever before. By sharing something that a brand has created or provided, they also tell the brand about themselves through social data. In this way, brands can now tap into an endless wellspring of consumer insights as they build social data equity.

Only people can focus on customers. And all businesses are customer-centric whether they think so or not. It’s just that some are focused on screwing their customers while others focus on making customers’ lives full of delight, and everything in between. Those who don’t cherish and respect and innovatively serve their customers will not be long for this world.

In the digital space, attention is a currency. We earn it. We spend it. But, we don’t think about it as a precious or earned commodity. We in many ways either take it for granted or assume we’re deserving of it based on what we do or what we offer.

The biggest integration mistake a brand can make at this point is to create barriers between their Facebook apps, site, content and data. These barriers result in poor user experience and incomplete information. Instead, CMOs should demand two things above all else from those creating their brand’s Facebook integrations: Seamlessness of design and information sharing, and the agility and skill required to keep pace with the incredible speed of social innovation.

You need to understand very early on that anything you’re doing which has not been done before can’t be, and won’t be, measured in the same way you might measure a TV commercial hitting X amount of eyeballs.

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That’s the acid test.

Visualisation can open up areas of knowledge to people who would not normally be interested in those areas. Images are nice to look at. Beautiful visual displays are appealing to everyone. So beautiful information display can act as ‘trojan horses’ to introduce new ideas or thoughts to new audiences.

So your content strategy is to steal..er, borrow, quotes from people who actually create content, write some fluff about it and how important it is, slap a photo on it and post it as your own. Nicely done!